On Winnicott's Clinical Innovations in the Analysis of Adults

The corpus of Winnicott's writings amounts to well over 600 articles and a simple search on PEP shows that his work is cited in almost 12,000 articles and books. The second edition of my book, The Language of Winnicott (2007), contains 165 subentries to 23 major entries. Each entry illustrates how Winnicott elaborated on Freud's work while in a continual discourse with the parallel Kleinian development. Thus the scope of the set title and brief by the Controversies Section has enormous potential and requires substantial research to give full credit to Winnicott's clinical innovations in the analysis of adults.

With this in mind, I now turn to present my understanding of Winnicott's clinical approach in working with adults and why I think his clinical innovations have significantly advanced psychoanalysis in its practice and theory.

The Clinical Language of Winnicott

It was only through analysis that I became gradually able to see a baby as a human being. This was really the chief result of my first five years of analysis …

Winnicott was one of the major conceptual innovators in the history of psychoanalysis during the 20th Century. The primacy of the environment-individual set-up is at the core his formulations and provides psychoanalysis with a new symbolic matrix i.e. the early parent-infant relationship. This contribution extends and amplifies the original Freudian Oedipal symbolic matrix. For Winnicott, psychoanalysis constitutes a scientific theory of emotional development and human nature, which is illuminated through the Freudian lens of psychoanalytic practice.

Winnicott's writings invoke the clinical situation and the day-to-day intrapsychic and inter-psychic struggle that is demanded of each analyst in clinical work. He is able to convey the ineffability of what it means to be in the continual process of becoming an analyst, due to being “on excellent terms with his primary processes” (Milner, 1972, p. 10). “He was first a